Bangladesh “food poisoning”. Contamination or mass hysteria?

We’ve been told that over 140 garment workers north of Dhaka fell ill on June 16 after drinking suspected contaminated water from work. Few media outlets have added that 140 reported symptoms – but scarcely any continued to show them after an hour or so

On the face of it, Sunday’s poisonings were just the latest of a series of food and water poisoning incidents in Bangladesh’s garment industry over the past month.

On June 5, over 500 at the Starlight Sweater Factory in Gazipur were reported to have been “hospitalised” after drinking contaminated water. The reports actually meant to say “taken to a hospital emergency ward for examination after claiming food poisoning symptoms”, but that wouldn’t have made so good a headline. On May 31, over 50 workers of Linda Fashion in Jamgarah area fell sick after eating food distributed by the factory, while the following night around 30 workers at Global Knit factory in Shimultala fell sick after eating food provided at work.

Naturally, activists suspect the worst. “There is fear persisting among garment workers since the [Rana Plaza] incident", said Mushrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers’ Unity Forum. She pointed out that hygiene standards throughout Bangladesh factories are poor: “The water used in the factories is not purified,” she said. “Most of these workers take water from jars that are filled with pipe waters without purification.”

Naturally, Bangladesh’s government and its factory owners have their standard explanation for everything. “We are suspecting that it was poisoning of the water. It could be some sort of pesticide,” said S.M. Mannan, a vice president of the BGMEA after the Starlight Sweater incident.  “This is an A-grade factory. It has its own water supply which comes from a deep tube well, so there is no scope for contamination. Someone might have mixed poison to the water”. Local industrial police officer Mahfuzur Rahman told reporters “Primarily we suspect the water supply of the Starlight Sweaters factory was poisoned or contaminated.”  

Neither group bothered checking how many people actually showed any symptoms after their hospital inspection. At one of the June 16 “outbreaks”, Alvin Fashion, just two people out of the 60 referred for examination needed treatment.

When Bangladesh’s Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research tested samples of the water after the incident at Starlight Sweaters on June 5, they did not find anything unusual from the regular contaminants in water.

The Institute’s director, Dr. Mahmudur Rahman, says such phantom outbreaks are not rare, especially at this time of year.  “This is a complicated issue, which has been recurrent in Bangladesh, particularly in schools. Most recently it is being observed in garment factories,” he has said, and identifies empty stomachs and dehydration during summer as a contributing factor to such outbreaks in the past.

According to the World Health Organization, the phenomenon seems especially common in politically charged environments, with a strong active rumour mill and a lot of young women in the same place. On June 3, 97 schoolgirls in northern Afghanistan were reported sick after smelling gas, only two months after a similar incident was reported in Takhar province in northeastern Afghanistan. Just as the Dhaka cases are being attributed to greedy bosses, the Afghan cases were attributed to a Taleban plot to discourage girls from attending school. But the WHO has concluded: “In the last four years over 1,634 cases from 22 schools have been treated for mass psychogenic illness in Afghanistan. There are no related deaths reported.”

There was a similar story in Palestine’s West Bank in 1983. 983 young women fainted in what was at first claimed by Palestinian nationalists to have been a chemical attack by Israelis (as part of their alleged plan to clear Arabs out of the West Bank), and then claimed by extremist Israeli supporters to have been created by Palestinian nationalists discrediting Israel. Later US and Israeli investigations – endorsed by the WHO – concluded the faintings were not the result of any chemicals, but had been triggered by collective anxiety.

Mahmudur Rahman is certainly not claiming the people affected in Bangladesh were well fed, properly hydrated, working in comfortable surroundings or had access to truly drinkable water. At Starlight, he concluded “the water cannot be considered for drinking.” And it’s not just young women in politically contentious environments that are the common thread in the Bangladesh, West Bank and Afghanistan “outbreaks”:  it’s young women who may not be in the best of health anyway. No outbreaks have been reported at elite schools, or among foreign brands’ buyers and quality controllers at any of the Bangladesh factories.  

But there’s an infinity of difference between nausea or digestive problems from unsuitable water and real poisoning.  Media referring to “hospitalisation” when they mean “gone for a check-up” or claiming the highest possible number of “casualties” when they mean “showing some symptoms” aren’t helping the problem: the evidence is that fear and uncertainty are part of the influences that lead to these “outbreaks”.

Calling these pseudo-poisonings “mass hysteria” (or the less sexist “mass psychogenic illness”) doesn’t mean the outbreaks weren’t at least in part induced by poverty, discomfort and well-founded anxiety about personal safety. In Bangladesh, the likelihood is that much of the food and water involved may not have passed proper safety inspections.

That’s no excuse for equally hysterical (OK: rabble-rousing) pseudo-journalism. Which is the best term I can think of for reporting the number of people reporting sick, and not the spectacularly smaller number found to have any symptoms